Motion and effects

KratosForge shows a few small animations when work changes state. They add a little of the wolf and forge identity without getting in the way, and you choose how much of it you see.

Nothing else changes with them: labels, times, outputs, progress and errors are the same at every level. No effect delays a run, takes keyboard focus, catches the pointer, moves other content or covers code, tables or errors. Effects only follow work that has already happened; they never start, wait for or change it, and none of them calls Fabric.

Choose how much moves#

Settings > Appearance > Motion & effects. Changes apply at once, even during a run, and are kept.

Level	What you see
0 Off	No animation at all
1 Minimal	Quick page and panel transitions only (a page slides 6 px in the direction you moved on the rail, 0.16 s)
2 Refined (default)	Subtle sparks, embers and the wolf on real progress
3 Expressive	The same moments with more character: a halftone ring and an offset outline on the anvil strike, a touch of depth on page changes

At Refined and Expressive, a switch for each family turns it off:

Switch	Effects
Wolf animations	The wolf on Run all progress, its arrival, the Wolf Run after long work
Forge sparks	Forge Spark, Anvil Strike, the failure ember
Running indicators	The glow on a running cell, the flow into a running pipeline step, the ring when Run all starts

Preview effects plays each effect on a sample, and runs a three-step sample pipeline on this PC (two short waits and a variable) to show Energy Flow. That run is kept in this PC's local pipeline run history like any local run; nothing goes to Fabric.

There is no sound.

Windows' reduced motion#

When Windows' Settings > Accessibility > Visual effects > Animation effects is off, KratosForge shows no motion at all, whatever the level. To keep your level anyway, untick Respect Windows' reduced-motion setting.

For IT#

Every key can be fixed in the policy file (Azure setup): "motion_level": 0 to 3, "motion_wolf", "motion_sparks", "motion_achievements" (off by default), "motion_ambient" and "motion_follow_system" (true or false). The earlier "forge_animations": false still locks motion Off unless the policy also sets motion_level.

Every effect and when it plays#

Event	Effect	Where	Length
A cell you ran succeeds	Forge Spark: a tiny orange spark leaves Succeeded	the cell's status	0.4 s
A cell you ran succeeds after 10 s or more	Wolf Run instead of the spark: the wolf crosses a small lane at the right of the status bar, leaving a few embers	status bar	0.9 s
A cell fails	Controlled Failure: a small ember beside Failed dims and goes out; the red label and the error are there from the first frame	the cell's status	0.45 s
Run all (or Run above, Run below) starts	Pulse: one orange ring off the Run all button	the button	0.35 s
Run all takes longer than 0.6 s	The status bar says Cell 3 of 8 on this PC, with the wolf at the share of cells done and embers rising behind it	status bar	until the run ends
Run all finishes	Wolf Arrival: the wolf glows once at the end and the track goes	status bar	0.55 s
A cell is running	A small breathing ember on Running (forge orange, because notebook cells run on this PC)	the cell's status	while running
A pipeline activity runs	Energy Flow: the link into the running activity carries a moving dash; each activity says Queued, In progress, Succeeded, Failed, Skipped or Cancelled in words	pipeline flow	while running
A pipeline activity finishes	It settles with one glow (succeeded) or the failure ember	the activity	0.45 s
A pipeline run succeeds	Anvil Strike (shown in Preview effects until the pipeline run screen arrives)	the run's result	0.65 s
A platform deployment succeeds (Source control)	Anvil Strike: a small anvil drops onto the "Deployed" message and two sparks fly. No shake, no flash	beside the message	0.65 s
Your developer profile records a milestone	Achievement Reveal: a ring and an offset outline reveal the badge once. Off unless you turn on Achievement celebrations, which appears when the developer profile ships	the badge	0.9 s

During Run all, cells don't spark one by one; the track shows the progress instead. Stop and Cancel show nothing. Activities inside ForEach and Until are counted on their parent ("In progress · 4 of 9"), never animated one by one. A pipeline flow always says where it runs: Local run on this PC (not run in Fabric) for a local run.

Screen readers#

Effects are hidden from screen readers. Instead the app says once when a cell you ran succeeds or fails, once when a run of several cells finishes, fails or is stopped ("Run finished: 8 cells succeeded", "Run stopped: cell 3 failed", "Run stopped"), and once when the sample pipeline ends. The run track is a progress bar with its value.

Performance#

Effects are CSS transform and opacity animations on one small element each, so the browser's compositor draws them without layout. The engine keeps them cheap:

At most three effects play at once; more are skipped, never queued. Each kind has a minimum gap (a spark at most every 0.3 s, a Wolf Run every 5 s), and an element never has two at once.
Nothing is made when the window is hidden, for an element that is off screen or gone, or below the effect's level. Ambient loops pause while the app isn't in front.
If the app's main thread is busy (long tasks adding up to 0.5 s within 5 s), effects drop one level for 30 s.
Every effect removes itself when it ends; a redraw of the page removes any still playing.

Measured with app/tests/browser/motion-benchmark.cjs (headless Chromium 141, Linux build machine, 2026-10-20; compare against your own runs rather than reading these as a promise for a given PC):

Measure	Off (0)	Expressive (3)
Run all, 20 cells, real engine (three runs)	380, 344, 291 ms	365, 324, 307 ms
Frame time during 200 events in 10 s: median / 95th / worst	16.7 / 16.7 / 16.8 ms	16.7 / 16.8 / 33.3 ms
Long tasks during the burst	0	0
Effect elements left afterwards	0	0
Main-thread time per `forgeEvent()` call	0.10 ms	0.23 ms

Run all times overlap between levels (the spread is the engine, not the effects). One frame in the Expressive burst took two vsyncs; no long task was recorded.

For developers#

app/ui/motion.js is the motion engine. Features don't animate on their own: they report what happened, and the engine decides whether and how it shows.

forgeEvent(name, anchor): something finished. FORGE_EVENTS maps the name to an effect kind; unknown names play nothing. Call it only after the state change is real (a status the engine returned), never to predict one.
fx(anchor, kind): plays one kind over an element. Returns the element, or null (and motionDiagnostics().skipped says why: level, family, gone, busy, budget, offscreen, gap).
MOTION: each kind's length (ms), minimum gap, lowest level, family and optional build for extra parts (the anvil, the running wolf).
wolfTrack(where, label, unit, engine): step progress with the wolf, real fractions only.
pipelineFlow(container): update(status) draws a pipeline_run_status result as linked activities and fires the activity events.
viewTransition(view): called by setView; animates only when the page changes.
motionLevel(), motionOn(family), applyMotion(), announce(text), motionDiagnostics().

To add an effect: add a kind to MOTION with a family and level, map an event to it in FORGE_EVENTS, write its CSS in styles.css under "Forge animations" or "Motion & effects" (keyframes named fx-, transform and opacity only, pointer-events: none), and give it a row in the Preview effects window. Tests in app/tests/ui.test.cjs check every event names a real kind, every kind has a family and a level of 2 or more, keyframes animate only transform and opacity, and no more than three effects play at once. app/tests/browser/motion-effects.test.cjs checks focus, pointer, reduced motion, settings and a real pipeline run.